Can I develop QT5 applications without QtCreator, or am I shooting myself in the foot that way?

Looking at the beginner's tutorials in the documentation, it seems that QtCreator plays a central part in development.

However I'm more of a simple text-editor kind of guy and like to get an idea of the components interacting, which IDEs tend to obscure. QT is my first attempt at creating graphical user interfaces, but I'm wondering if I can keep my habit of writing most things manually by hand.

Could I use QtDesigner to create the GUI related files, but write the "slots" and qmake files in my text-editor of choice? Would this lead to a world of pain and simply not be worth it? Being new to QT, I have no way of estimating this.

Can I develop QT5 applications without QtCreator, or am I shooting myself in the foot that way?

Yes you can On windows use Qt 5 add-on.

[quote author="Adrian5" date="1411042514"]

Could I use QtDesigner to create the GUI related files, but write the "slots" and qmake files in my text-editor of choice? Would this lead to a world of pain and simply not be worth it? Being new to QT, I have no way of estimating this.[/quote]
yes you can use Qt designer independently.
why simpler editor .
using Qt creator you will have fast development.
it will provide you intellisense ,refactoring like features.
The world shifted away from old/normal editor.Programmers need fast and modern IDE.
hope it helps

You can use whatever editor you like be it vi, emacs, nano etc. No restriction with that. The command line is enough as long as you know how to play with the tools. qmake does the hard work. You can also use cmake or qbs if it suits your taste better.

However, on Windows I would recommend using Qt Creator. Windows is not the most command line friendly OS

[quote author="Adrian5" date="1411042514"]Could I use QtDesigner to create the GUI related files, but write the "slots" and qmake files in my text-editor of choice? Would this lead to a world of pain and simply not be worth it? Being new to QT, I have no way of estimating this.[/quote]Yes, that's definitely possible.

Note that we have no way of estimating the pain level either. I just know that I prefer the automation provided by IDEs, although I understand what you mean by "get an idea of the components interacting, which IDEs tend to obscure" -- that's certainly a valid reason to learn things the manual way.

If you want to continue, I recommend reading old tutorials to get an idea on how to run the console tools. See http://doc.qt.digia.com/4.3/tutorial.html . There have been some changes between Qt 4 and Qt 5 however, so the code in the old tutorials won't run without modifications. I give you this link mainly for the process of building your application manually.

There's also the translation related tools that you should take a look at. Even if you don't plan to provide your application in other languages, it's a good habit to have your code ready for it, you never know :)